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UNITED STATES OP AMERICA. 



A PLAIN ARGUMENT 
FOR GOD 



BY 



GEORGE STUART FULLERTON 
il 

PROFESSOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN THE 
UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA 




PHILADELPHIA 

J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY 

1889 






T.0-0 



Copyright, 1889, by J. B. Lippincott Company. 



TO THE MEMORY 

OF 

1VEY DKAR. KRIEND 

BENJAMIN BARTIS COMEGYS, Jr. 

THIS LITTLE BOOK 
IS AFFECTIONATELY INSCRIBED. 



PREFACE. 



I have long been of the opinion that 
the argument for God, as it is usually pre- 
sented, gives but little satisfaction to the 
vast mass of thoughtful men and women 
who approach the subject with an earnest 
desire to satisfy not only the demands of 
the intellect but also of the heart. The 
language used is so far removed from that 
of common life as to be not readily intelli- 
gible. Some of the arguments put forward 
seem to the plain man little better than 
metaphysical quibbles, and if he assents to 
them it is rather because he already agrees 
with their conclusion than because he sees 
their force. The one argument which does 
appeal to him as simple and natural is pre- 
sented in such a way as to lead him to a 
God, not present and living, but of the 
past. 



6 Preface. 

This, however, is not at all what he has 
meant by the word God. To him the word 
has signified a Being- in a close personal 
relation to him, a Father of Spirits, " who 
is not far from every one of us." The 
reasoning does not assure him of the ex- 
istence of the God in whom he has been 
accustomed to believe, and he has a tortur- 
ing sense that either he has not grasped 
the arguments or the foundations of his 
belief will not bear too much investigation. 

Now it is with a conviction that the 
argument for God's existence can be stated 
simply and plainly, and in a way to appeal 
to a thoughtful mind unaccustomed to 
following the reasonings of the schools, 
that this little book has been written. It 
has grown out of three lectures on the sub- 
ject delivered before the Churchwoman's 
Institute in Philadelphia in the spring of 
1888. The lectures, which many seemed 
to find helpful, were delivered to an intelli- 
gent but a popular audience; and in pre- 
paring my thoughts upon the subject for 



Preface. 7 

publication I have had such an audience in 
view. My endeavor throughout has been 
to make my thought clear to all persons of 
fair intelligence who read with any degree 
of attention and reflection. 

As, however, I have to some degree left 
the beaten track in the endeavor to employ 
plain and simple language, where it is cus- 
tomary to use what maybe called technical 
terms, I have laid myself open to mis- 
understanding on the part of those who 
rest rather in words than in the thought 
they represent. In the interests of clear- 
ness and directness this was unavoidable. 
I ask, therefore, that my readers try to get 
a clear view of my thought itself before 
passing judgment on the argument that 
follows. 

GEORGE STUART FULLERTON. 



University of Pennsylvania, 
January, 1889. 



CONTENTS. 



Chapter 

I. The Common Argument 

II. The Search for Mind . 

III. God in Nature . 

IV. The Witness of Literature 
V. Theism or Pantheism . 

VI. The Reign of Law in Nature 
VII. The Eternity of Matter and the Doc 

trine of Evolution . 
VIII. Conclusion . 



Page 
// 

25 

44 
62 

75 
86 



99 
107 



A 
PLAIN ARGUMENT FOR GOD. 

CHAPTER I. 

The Common Argument. 

If we take up what seems the simplest 
and most natural argument for the exist- 
ence of God, as we find it presented in 
most books on the subject, we will see that 
it argues about as follows : 

Things are constantly happening in the 
world about us. As I look from my win- 
dow at the autumn landscape, the withered 
leaves on the trees are now moving and 
now at rest. In a moment the motion be- 
comes more noticeable, and two or three 
loose their hold upon the twigs and fall to 
the ground. Now they are followed by 



12 A Plain Argument for God. 

many more, and those that have fallen flut- 
ter here and there, collecting in sheltered 
corners or whirling about each other in 
little eddies. Why has this happened ? 
From my window I have seen only the 
landscape and the leaves : the motion 
seems to have begun and ended without 
any reason at all. 

But, if I ask even a child why the leaves 
moved, he answers at once, " Because the 
wind blew." If I ask him whether they 
could move if the wind did not blow, he 
answers without hesitation, " No." As to 
this particular event, the motion of the 
dead leaves, his mind is quite made up, — 
it could not have taken place without some 
cause. Very likely with this answer he 
stops thinking about the matter, but his 
answer has made me reflect. If the wind 
is the cause of the motion of the leaves, 
what is the cause of the wind ? Could 
the wind begin to blow without any reason 
any more than the leaves could move with- 
out any reason? And if there must be 



The Common Argument. ij 

some cause why the wind began to blow, 
what was the cause of that cause ? and the 
cause of that one ? and of that one ? And 
if everything that happens must have some 
cause, must we not, to explain just why 
the leaves moved as I looked at them, go 
back and back either without end, or until 
we find some cause which differs from 
other things in being the very first, and in 
not needing a cause at all ? 

Now, if we go to men of science, we 
find that they always assume that anything 
that happens must have some cause, even if 
they do not know what that cause is. In 
their examination into the secrets of nature 
they are always looking for causes of what 
they see, and until they find them they do 
not pretend to understand what they see. 
And they are not satisfied with tracing out 
the causes of things for a little way and 
then stopping, but they always hold that 
the last cause which they have found has 
its cause too, and that the search for causes 
should never be given up. 



14. A Plain Argument for God. 

Some men, indeed, go so far as to say 
that this chain of causes is really endless, 
and that there can be no first cause, for 
that, like the motion of the leaves, would 
have to be explained by some cause be- 
fore it. 

Now the argument, which I am discuss- 
ing, for the existence of God accepts all 
that is said about the necessity that what- 
ever happens should have its cause, and 
that cause its cause, and so on ; but it 
insists that this chain of causes cannot be 
really endless, but must end in a First 
Cause, which is God ; and this it does on 
the ground that unless we assume a First 
Cause, we have really no cause at all, but 
only a series of effects or results, all of 
which are uncaused. 

Having arrived at this point the argu- 
ment in question goes on to say that 
everything that happens must have some 
sufficient cause. We know that if we 
wish to produce anything we must go 
about it in the right way, and, if we see 



The Common Argument. 75 

anything happen, we do not simply assume 
any cause at all, but some cause that we 
think would naturally produce such a re- 
sult. When the leaves moved, I explained 
it by the blowing of the wind, because I 
knew that the blowing of the wind is a 
cause which would naturally make the 
leaves move. And if I see a house in pro- 
cess of building, I never suppose that the 
blowing of the wind is building the house, 
because, from all I know of the wind and 
the house, it seems to me absurd to sup- 
pose that the former could produce the 
latter. What shocks the mind of a grown 
person in reading such tales as the " Ara- 
bian Nights" is simply the disregard of 
this truth, that causes and effects should 
be properly proportioned to each other. 
How the rubbing of a lamp should com- 
pel a spirit to obey us we cannot see, nor 
how a few words pronounced by way of a 
charm should change a human being into 
a dog or an ape into a human being. 
When we say all this is improbable, we 



1 6 A Plain Argument for God. 

mean that the causes given do not natu- 
rally produce the effects ascribed to them, 
and the sense of unreality this brings into 
our minds spoils our pleasure in the read- 
ing. It is only the child, who has no clear 
notion of what is natural, and who cannot 
therefore have any clear notion of what is 
unnatural, that is not repelled by such 
improbabilities. 

It is for this reason— that causes must 
be proportioned to effects — that I always 
assume a builder to explain the building of 
the house; and if the plan of the house is 
particularly original and ingenious, I natu- 
rally infer that this is due to unusual abil- 
ity and ingenuity on the part of its author. 
Every one reasons in this way about com- 
mon things ; and, to use a famous old 
illustration, no one, finding a watch in a 
desert place, would suppose that it had 
any other cause than the mind and hands 
of some watchmaker, — the only thing we 
know capable of making a watch. If 
everything that happens must have a suf- 



The Common Argument. 17 

ficient cause, we say, then the cause as- 
sumed, when the thing in question shows 
plan, must be a reasonable one, a mind, as 
the only thing capable of planning. Other- 
wise, you fall into the absurdities of the 
" Arabian Nights ;" for is it more absurd 
to assume that a brazen horse can rise into 
the air through a man's mounting it, than 
to assume that a thing that shows plan can 
be brought about by a creature incapable 
of planning? 

If, now, we look at the world about us, 
do we not find on every side evidences of 
adaptation and apparent purpose? Are 
not means fitted to ends through the whole 
domain of nature ? and can we open our 
eyes without having forced on our atten- 
tion mechanisms of the most marvellous 
intricacy and complexity ? Which is the 
more remarkable in its structure and work- 
ings, a watch or a human body ? And if 
we find that a human body is not, con- 
sidered in itself alone, a complete thing at 
all, but like a watch without its key, quite 



18 A Plain Argument for God. 

useless, unless we suppose it in relation to 
the other things in nature, — food, water, air, 
all of which it needs in order to subsist 
and be serviceable ; and if we then pass on 
to the reflection that everything in nature 
is in this way related to the whole of 
nature, as a part of it, so that we must 
look upon nature as a unit, a harmonious 
whole, full of meaning and plan and pur- 
pose ; — if we do this, and then go back to 
the cause of all this, must we not infer 
that there is but one First Cause, wise as 
well as powerful, who is the Author of this 
harmonious plan, and the source of all its 
workings? 

But there is one further step in the 
argument. Suppose that in looking about 
in the world we find, not only that things 
seem very wisely adapted to attain their 
ends, but that they seem on the whole to 
work together for good : that the ends for 
which nature seems to strive appear to be 
good ends. And suppose that from such 
an observation of nature we turn away 



The Common Argument. 19 

with the conviction that the system of 
things as a whole is good, and contains a 
certain moral order or plan. Now, if it is 
reasonable to argue that, when the things 
we see indicate a plan, we may infer as 
their cause a Mind, is it not reasonable to 
argue further that, when the things we see 
indicate not only a plan but a good plan, 
— I mean morally good, — we may infer as 
their author a Good Mind ? That is to 
say, may we not infer such a Being as we 
mean when we use the word God ? 

With this ends the famous "Argument 
from Design," as it is called, to prove the 
existence of God. 

You will notice that the argument thus 
stated has two main divisions. The one 
argues from what happens to a First Cause, 
without inquiring as to the character of 
that cause. The other passes from the 
nature of what is to be explained, the 
world, to the nature of the First Cause as 
intelligent and good, and so comes to a 
God. The argument is an old one, and 



20 A Plain Argument for God. 

has had the assent of many great minds. 
It should be carefully weighed by every 
one. 

Nevertheless, I should like any fair- 
minded man, who has already been a be- 
liever in God, and has felt His presence 
in the world, to ask himself whether this 
reasoning just satisfies the demands of his 
religious nature. Has it made God any 
more real to him, to have followed the 
argument? Quite apart from the fact that 
an important part of the argument, the 
inference to a First Cause on the ground 
that the series of causes cannot be con- 
ceived as endless, is not unhesitatingly ad- 
mitted by every one, — quite apart from this 
fact, and supposing the argument faultless 
in every particular, does it not still set God 
at the end of a vista which puts Him out 
of the present religious experience of the 
man who is seeking Him ? Suppose some 
one to whom he should present this argu- 
ment were to say, " I admit all that. I 
believe God created the world and set 



The Common Argument. 21 

nature in motion, but I believe that there 
His contact with the world ceased. There 
is no evidence that He is now in personal 
relation with me. His action is of the 
past, and not of the present." How could 
our argument for God answer this? If 
our champion should try to answer it by 
pointing to God's goodness as seen in the 
world to-day, would not his opponent at 
once suggest that, according to his own 
arguments, to prove God the author of 
this goodness he must go back to a First 
Cause, and infer that this First Cause is 
good ? And would not this be in fact ad- 
mitting that the only provable cause of 
anything is a God acting in the past? and 
a very distant past at that? 

There have been men who have argued 
in just the spirit of this objection concern- 
ing God and His relation to the world. 
Their reasonings have not been regarded 
as satisfactory to the religious nature of 
man, nor have their results been widely 
accepted.. The teaching of the Church, 



22 A Plain Argument for God, 

taking that word in the broadest sense 
possible, has always been Theistic, while 
this view of things is Deistic. I had not 
intended to use in this discussion any of 
those words which belong more properly 
to the schools than to the language of 
common life, but it is convenient to use 
these two, as they mark an important dis- 
tinction, and one which we will do well to 
keep in mind. I shall try to make their 
meaning quite plain. Both words have 
the same derivation from the word God, 
but one is from the Greek word and one 
from the Latin. Both words are used in 
somewhat varying senses, but one sense in 
which they have been used, and the sense 
in which I shall use them, distinguishes 
between them in this way. Both the 
Deist and the Theist are believers in a 
God in some sense of the term, but the 
Deist believes in a God only as First 
Cause, as source of things, while the 
Theist believes in a God as also preserver 
and governor of things, — a God now re- 



The Common Argument. 23 

vealed in nature and now and always in 
personal relation to man. Of course it fol- 
lows, that it is only upon the latter view, 
the Theistic, that religion, in any proper 
sense of the term, is possible. There can 
be no communion with God, if God is in 
no present relation with the world in 
which one lives. 

Now, if you have followed with care the 
argument for God with which this chapter 
has been taken up, you must see that, 
standing as it does, it proves what the 
Deist holds, but it does not seem to go on 
to prove what the Theist wishes to believe. 
I hope you will not for a moment under- 
stand me to say that the writers who have 
brought it forward, and who still bring it 
forward, are not Theists, and perhaps very 
earnest Theists. But I am quite willing to 
say, and I think you will agree with me in 
saying, that they are Theists, not because 
of their argument, but in spite of it. 
They are Theists, I suppose, because the 
world in which we live is always offering 



24. A Plain Argument for God. 

to one whose eyes, like the wise man's, 
are in his head, a much more natural and 
simple argument for God, and one which 
does not go back for a sight of God to the 
creation of the world and the beginnings 
of time. Of this argument I will speak in 
the following chapters. 



CHAPTER II. 

The Search for Mind. 

Before asking ourselves whether we 
can find God in nature, and, if so, how, 
it would be well to have a clear idea of 
what we are looking for when we seek 
Him there. If we do not, must not our 
search be a random one ? and may it not 
possibly turn out to be conducted on a 
quite false and fruitless method? If by 
the word God I do not mean a thing that 
can be seen with the eyes or touched 
with the fingers, — a material thing, — and 
if nevertheless I look through nature for 
God with the methods of physical science, 
which are adapted to finding material 
things, must not my search, however thor- 
ough, be necessarily fruitless ? And if, 
after searching for God in this way, I fail 
to find Him, does that give me the right to 
say that I am now certain He does not 



26 A Plain Argument for God. 

exist ? Until I have some notion of what 
it is that I mean by the word God, I am in 
no position to prove either that He exists 
or that He does not, for I have no idea in 
what direction to turn for my proofs. 

Now, without going into disputed points, 
but confining ourselves to what all reason- 
able men will admit, we may safely say 
thus much: by the word God we at least 
signify a Mind, a Person ; and the ques- 
tion whether God can be found in nature 
is at bottom the question whether mind is 
revealed in nature, — a mind which is yet 
not your mind or mine, but something 
much greater and more comprehensive ; 
but, still, always a mind. If, then, the 
search for God is a search for mind, we 
must conduct it as we usually conduct the ^ 
search for minds, and in no other way. It 
is with the question of how we commonly 
conduct this search for minds, and what 
we mean when we say we have found one, 
that this chapter is concerned. 

It is now admitted on all hands that the 



The Search for Mind. 27 

minds with which infants appear upon this 
mortal stage have been much overrated, 
not merely by their mothers, as is perhaps 
natural, but by the world at large. The 
little creature which blinks and stares with 
its face towards the light is commonly sup- 
posed to see objects much as we do ; and 
when it jerks about in its aimless way its 
small arms and legs, it is supposed to have 
a fair knowledge of what they are and of 
the fact that they belong to it. When it 
starts at hearing a sound, we are apt to 
imagine that the sensation has to it some- 
what the same significance that it has to 
us, who have heard sounds and connected 
them with objects around us for many 
years. This reputation for intelligence 
would seem to have been gained some- 
what as the stupid man gained his repu- 
tation for profound wisdom, by a policy of 
strict silence. The students of mind in 
children are beginning to find out that it 
is about as well founded as that, and that 
the mental furniture of a very young in- 



28 A Plain Argument for God. 

fant is scanty to a degree which we have 
not heretofore suspected. They are begin- 
ning, too, to give us some account of the 
growth of what, starting in such poverty, 
may end in the wealth of knowledge and 
wisdom of a Newton or a Kant. 

It will not take a great deal of reflection 
to show any one that their statements are 
reasonable, and that a mind beginning to 
feel and to think must begin in a very 
small way. I will take an illustration and 
see if I cannot make this clear. As I 
write, there is lying on my desk before me 
an apple. I say this, although I have not 
touched it, or smelt it, or tasted it. I have 
only seen it. Moreover, I see it only from 
the one side, so that I only see a small 
part of what I could see if I were to turn 
it over and around and look at every part 
of it. And when I call it an apple, I have 
some notion that if I were to cut it in two 
I should see white instead of red, with a 
little black or brown in the centre where I 
believe the seeds to be. Just notice how 



The Search for Mind. 2g 

j much more is in my mind about the apple 
than what I actually see. I actually see 
only a little patch of red color of a certain 
shape, and I supply from my past experi- 
ence of apples all the rest, — the idea that 
if I were to turn it round I could see the 
other parts of it, the idea of the white 
flesh, the idea of the seeds. Is it reason- 
able to suppose that I could have supplied 
all this if I had not had any past experi- 
ence of apples ? And when we go on to 
the touch qualities of the apple, its hard- 
ness and smoothness, its weight, and all 
the rest; and from these to the taste and 
the smell, — how is it that as soon as I see 
that little patch of red color on the table 
in front of me I think of all these, and 
connect them with the apple? Hardness 
is not anything like color, nor is weight, 
nor is taste, nor any of the rest. I certainly 
do not see them. Why do I believe them 
there? Is it not because, although these 
qualities are all unlike each other, yet I 
have always found in my past experience 



jo A Plain Argument for God. 

that they are grouped in nature, and that 
when I can see the color I can if I choose 
feel the hardness or weight, or smell or 
taste the apple ? If all my life I had only 
seen objects and never touched them, 
would I have any reason to believe that 
in addition to the sensation of color I now 
experience I could also have experiences 
of touch and taste and smell ? And if the 
idea of an apple is made up of all these 
experiences together, could I, in the case 
I have supposed, get any true idea of an 
apple at all by just seeing one before 
me? 

Now suppose an infant in its nurse's 
arms brought close up to my desk, and 
placed in front of the apple so that it can- 
not help seeing its color. Suppose that it 
is still so young that it has not had much 
experience of the fact that when certain 
sensations of color enter its small mind, 
certain sensations of touch can be made to 
enter too, — that is, that things seen can 
also be touched. Will not in such a case 



The Search for Mind. ji 

the sensation of color stand quite by itself 
and disconnected from any thought of any 
further experience ? And if the child is to 
have any notion of an apple as we know 
apples, with all their different qualities, 
must not this knowledge grow up grad- 
ually, from an experience in which one 
sensation accompanies another again and 
again until the mind learns to connect 
them, and learns to expect to find them 
always together? This reasoning is ap- 
plied also to the child's knowledge of its 
own body, and it is held that it is un- 
reasonable to suppose that an infant knows 
that the little white object that it sees in 
front of its face when it waves its hand 
about, is its hand, — that is, a thing that can 
be touched as well as seen, and can touch 
as well as be touched. As soon as we see 
a hand we of course think of all this, but 
we do this because we have had a long ex- 
perience of hands, and this experience the 
infant has not had. 

From all this it is evident that when 



32 A Plain Argument for God. 

sensations first come to the mind of an 
infant they do not mean much. It does 
not know what they signify. And it is 
evident, too, that the growth of its mind 
means not only the having of more and 
more sensations, but also a discovery of 
their meaning, — that is, a discovery of the 
fact that they are connected in certain 
fixed ways which will allow the mind 
to make inferences from sensations now 
present to sensations which are not now 
present. A burnt child, it is said, dreads 
the fire, and this simply means that a child 
which has once seen the fire and felt it 
knows when it sees it another time, and 
without having to feel it again, that this 
particular sensation of color and form may 
be followed by a sensation of quite a dif- 
ferent kind, which it is particularly anxious 
not to have. The sensation, you see, has 
gained a meaning, because it has become 
connected with another sensation. It is 
now known that the fire which is seen can 
burn. So it is that the child connects feel- 



The Search for Mind. jj 

ing with feeling, until what was at first a 
mere string of disconnected and unmean- 
ing sensations grows into an orderly and 
meaning-full world of things. 

Suppose further that the child has by 
this time gained some acquaintance with 
its own body and with the things about it. 
It knows its own hand now when it sees 
it : it knows that this is a thing that can 
be touched as well as seen, and that can 
touch other things w r hich can be seen. 
Now it discovers that the hand is a thing 
of a different kind from the apple. Both 
can be seen and touched, but when the 
apple is touched by anything the result is 
not just the same as when the hand is. 
One may cut into the apple or crush the 
apple, and it makes little difference, but if 
one cut into the hand or crush the hand it 
matters very much. The one object is by 
no means so important to the child's mind, 
nor so closely connected with its mind, as 
is the other. When the apple is cut there 
is no pain, and when the hand is cut there 



jj. A Plain Argument for God. 

is pain. When the apple is seen to roll 
against some other object and touch it, the 
child only sees it, — that is, it has only a 
sensation of sight; but when its hand is 
seen to touch another object, the child not 
only sees it but feels it; it has an added 
sensation of touch. By remembering such 
experiences and comparing them the child 
gradually learns that this particular object, 
its own body, is an object with which are 
somehow connected pleasure and pain, and 
even the possibility of knowing about 
other objects and of acting upon them by 
its will, as all these things are not con- 
nected with other objects. Though it is 
quite unable to put the information into 
words, it is finding out that its body is an 
object with which is somehow connected a 
mind. 

But in the world about the child are 
a number of objects which are more or 
less like its own body. Its nurse and its 
mother have bodies like its own, and these 
it can see as it sees its own. As it comes 



The Search for Mind. J5 

to know more and more about things, it 
learns to distinguish these from the other 
things about it and to class them as things 
of a kind with its own body. And as it 
finds in its own experience that certain 
states of mind, say pains or pleasures, are 
always present when its body goes through 
certain motions or is affected in certain 
ways, and learns to connect these states of 
mind with these bodily actions or condi- 
tions ; so, when it sees the same actions or 
conditions in the bodies of its nurse and 
mother, it at once calls up in memory 
these states of mind and connects them 
in thought with these other bodies too. 
The child first observes, you see, that 
when its own body is injured there is a 
feeling of pain, and then goes on to the 
belief that when certain other bodies which 
are like its own are similarly injured, here, 
too, the injury is not like an injury done 
to a chair or table, but results in pain, — 
that is, it affects a mind. Not that the 
child sees or feels the pain itself, or can 



j6 A Plain Argument for God. 

by any possibility be made to see or feel 
directly this other mind ; but it interprets 
what it does see, and the most natural in- 
terpretation of what it sees is, that there 
is revealed by these other bodies a some- 
thing like what it experiences in connection 
with its own body, a mind with its sen- 
sations. 

Keep in mind the fact that all that the 
child can know of these other minds is 
what it can read into them by interpreting 
the motions of their bodies, — their gest- 
ures, their facial expressions, their words. 
It can never directly perceive any mind 
but its own. It must guess the mind from ** 
the body. Perhaps another illustration 
will serve to make this more clear. 

Suppose a child to see for the first time 
a smile upon its mother's face. Now a 
smile is surely not anything like the feel- 
ing of love that prompts a smile. No one 
can see a feeling of love, and one can see 
a smile. The one is in the mother's mind, 
and the other is on the mother's face. 



The Search for Mind. 37 

How is the child to know what the smile 
that it sees means ? How can it tell that 
this expression indicates a thing so unlike 
itself, and a thing which must always re- 
main unseen ? Is there any other way for 
it to discover the meaning of the smile 
than to notice some time when it is smiling 
itself what feeling prompts a smile, and 
then, having learned from its own body 
the meaning of this new action, to inter- 
pret the smile by this same feeling when 
it sees it in another body? But if a child 
could grow up without ever having had 
in any degree at all the feeling of love, 
could it ever form any idea at all of the 
meaning of expressions of love on the 
part of those about it ? It would still see 
the bodily actions, and the expressions of 
the face, and hear the words, but would 
not the whole language of affection be as 
totally beyond it as is a message in cipher 
to a man who has lost the key ? Remem- 
ber, the feeling itself in the mind of an- 
other we can never see as we see the 



j8 A Plain Argument for God. 

face of another. We must call it up in 
memory to connect it with this or that 
other body; and how can we call up in 
memory what we have never felt ? It is 
quite impossible to explain to a man who 
has always been blind what a color is, and 
this is because, although he can hear our 
explanations very well, there is in his ex- 
perience nothing that he can call up in 
response to the words, which would truly 
correspond to what is in our minds when 
we speak them. To get at our thought, 
since he cannot see it directly, he must in- 
terpret our words in thoughts of his own ; 
and he fails, because when we speak of 
colors he cannot call up in his memory 
any sensations of color, and the words 
remain mere words to him. He will never 
find out what is in our minds when we 
utter them. 

This fact, then, is sufficiently clear : that 
when a man says that another man's mind 
is revealed to him by his words and ac- 
tions, he can only mean that he observes 



The Search for Mind. jg 

such and such motions in the other man's 
body, and, having learned from his own 
body what thoughts and feelings accom- 
pany what bodily actions, he interprets in 
this language learned from himself what 
he sees, and thus builds up for himself in 
his imagination a picture of the other 
man's mind. No one gets nearer to an- 
other mind than this his own picture of 
it. As he interprets what he sees in the 
other body well or ill, his knowledge of 
the other mind will be true and com- 
plete, or false and incomplete. If he does 
the work very well he will have a good 
accurate knowledge of the other mind ; 
but, however accurate, it is always his 
own picture of it that he has, and nothing 
else. 

Now it is not only to the knowledge of 
other men's minds that we come in this 
way, but to the knowledge of all minds 
whatever. Indeed, it is to just this experi- 
ence that we refer when we use the phrase 
" another mind" at all. Why do I believe 



40 A Plain Argument for God. 

that a dog has a mind, unless because I 
have seen in his actions what is best inter- 
preted by my own experience of hope, or 
fear, or anger, or love ? Why do I speak 
of one horse as more intelligent than an- 
other, unless because I see in his actions 
something more analogous to actions of 
my own ? Why do I say that it is doubt- 
ful whether a sponge has a mind at all, un- 
less because I see in it so little that is like 
my experience of my own body, that I 
find almost nothing that needs interpreta- 
tion in terms of thought and feeling and 
will ? In none of these instances do I see 
any mind at all directly and immediately. 
The nature of my reasoning is precisely 
the same in all cases. Where I find traces 
of what I have learned to regard as indica- 
tions of thought or feeling or will, I infer 
mind ; and I try to build up for myself as 
good an idea as I can of what the mind 
is like. Upon the indications will depend 
my opinion as to whether the mind is a 
wise one or a weak one, a clear one or a 



The Search for Mind. j.r 

dim one. For me these bodily indications, 
and they alone, are the index of another 
mind. Other minds can be reached only 
through these. 

I spoke a little while ago of bodies as 
" revealing" mind. The meaning of this 
word is now, I hope, unmistakable. Of 
course it cannot mean that we find mind 
on the surfaces of bodies, as we find 
colors; nor in bodies, as the seeds are in 
an apple. The most foolish man will 
hardly expect to see his friend's mind as 
he sees his friend's wig. Nor do we mean 
that the minds are the bodies, for then 
why should we single out these particu- 
lar bodies, as bodies with minds, and dis- 
tinguish them from bodies without minds ? 
and why should we class them with our 
own bodies, which we certainly distinguish 
from our minds ? No ! when we speak of 
bodies as revealing mind, we simply mean 
that we observe in them certain signs or 
marks which experience of our bodies has 
taught us to recognize as signs of thought 



42 A Plain Argument for God. 

or feeling or will, and that we can build up 
a picture of these minds by interpreting 
these signs. 

As it happens, we have been building 
up in this way ideas of other minds all our 
lives, so that the process has become very 
rapid and easy, — so rapid and so easy that 
we never think of the steps of the process 
at all, but, like the practised reader, who 
is absorbed in the thought of his book and 
hardly notices the letters, pass on at once 
from the signs to the things signified, and 
seem to have at once before us the com- 
plete thought of another mind. Never- 
theless, rapid or slow, conscious or uncon- 
scious, this is the process we actually go 
through with every time we find another 
mind. This is what we mean when we 
speak of finding a mind; and it will easily 
be seen that a search for a mind, which 
starts out with the supposition that it is to 
be sought for in some other direction, — 
perhaps as an object immediately perceived 
in the world around us, — is very likely to 



The Search for Mind. 4.3 

be a disappointing search. Quite as dis- 
appointing as the one in which Swift's 
worthy persevered for so many years, — 
the search for a method of , extracting sun- 
beams from cucumbers. 



CHAPTER III. 

God in Nature. 

I hope it is quite clear from the reason- 
ing of the last chapter, that when we say 
we have found a mind we never mean that 
we have seen one directly or touched one. 
And I hope it is equally clear that we look 
for minds of all kinds in just the same 
way, by interpreting the signs of mind 
that we see in bodies, and thus building up 
some idea of the minds revealed by those 
bodies. In the last chapter I referred, in 
illustration of this latter point, only to 
cases in which the mind inferred is inferior 
to the mind of man, — as in the dog or the 
horse. But there is no reason at all why 
we should not in just the same way infer 
higher minds if we find anywhere in our 
experience the marks or signs which can 
best be interpreted as revealing higher 
minds. When a child stands before his 



God in Nature. 4.5 

father and listens to his words, he cer- 
tainly gains some notion that his father 
has a mind, and a mind superior to his 
own. He knows very well that he can- 
not entirely comprehend that mind, nor 
know all that there is to be known about 
it, but he knows well enough that the 
play of feature that he sees, and the words 
he hears, indicate mind, and a mind higher 
and broader than his mind. 

Is it not a matter of every-day experi- 
ence that some of the men we meet im- 
press us with a sense of our own mental 
inferiority ? Why is this, except that we 
see in their words and actions what will 
necessitate a recognition of higher minds 
than our own ? All men may be born 
free, but they are certainly not born equal 
in mental ability any more than in physi- 
cal stature; and yet, just as the abler man 
builds up for himself an idea of the inferior 
mind, so the inferior man builds up for 
himself an idea of the higher mind, and 
recognizes that it is above him. And as a 



j.6 A Plain Argument for God. 

man of less ability can do this with respect 
to the mind of a Newton, so he could do 
it with respect to the mind of some being 
higher than man if he found anywhere 
indications of that mind as he finds indica- 
tions of mind in another man's body. If I 
were to meet somewhere a being differing 
as much from man in the one direction as 
do the horse and the dog in the other, and 
if a careful observation of the actions of this 
being were to show me that these actions 
are analogous with those by which my own 
mental states are expressed, but that they 
are more complex than my actions, and 
differ from them somewhat as my actions 
differ from those of the lower animals, — if 
my observation were to show me. all this, 
would not I naturally and at once assume 
that this being possessed a mind ? Would 
not I think of this mind as like mine, in so 
far as it was a mind, but different from 
mine in being higher ? Differences in the 
signs to be interpreted of course necessi- 
tate differences in the interpretation. 



God in Nature. 4.J 

And if, after I had met the being of 
which I have spoken, I should meet an- 
other being whose actions put him still 
higher in the scale, should I not set to 
work to build up for myself an idea of his 
mind, reasoning in the same way, and 
making my idea of his mind different from 
my idea of the former one, according to 
the differences that I find in the actions to 
be interpreted? There is only one limit 
that can be set to this way of reasoning, 
and that is this : The ground upon which 
I go in my reasoning' always is, as you 
have seen, that I have found in my own 
experience of my body that certain signs 
in the. body always signify certain states of 
mind, and when I see such signs or some- 
thing like them in another body, I infer 
such states of mind or something like 
them in another mind. Now, as the signs 
which I see in another body differ more 
and more from the signs of which I have 
learned the meaning in my own, I infer 
that the mental states differ correspond- 



4.8 A Plain Argument for God. 

ingly. And if the difference should go 
to such a point that the marks seen in 
another body should not resemble at all 
the signs that I have come to look upon 
as a revelation of mind, then, of course, I 
should have no reason at all to infer a 
mind like mine, or anything like it. But 
up to this limit the reasoning holds good ; 
wherever I see signs of mind I may infer 
mind, and my belief as to the character of 
the mind may justly rest upon the nature 
of the signs. 

Now to apply this argument to God. 
From the earliest times thoughtful men 
have been impressed with the fact that 
nature reveals a Mind, as well as minds. 
When we look about us we discover minds 
of many orders in men and the lower ani- 
mals, each revealed by that little mass of 
organized matter that we call an animal 
body. But, as I have suggested in the 
first chapter, when we come to examine 
one of these bodies more closely we find 
that it is not really an independent thing at 



God in Nature. 4.9 

all, but only a part of the great system of 
nature, and bound to all other things by 
natural laws. The body in question must 
depend for its subsistence upon the other 
things around it. It was produced from 
them, and after it is dissolved its particles . 
will be scattered to them again. Birth and 
growth, and decay and death, are a part of 
the general plan of things in nature ; and . 
this particular body belongs to that plan 
and must obey its laws. In order that this 
body might live and move at this present 
moment, the forces of nature must have 
been active before its birth, and these 
forces must themselves have depended 
upon other forces obeying natural laws ; 
and so we might go to every part of the 
great world of things and find that had 
this particular body been different even in 
one little point, perhaps all its past causes 
would have had to be different, and all 
other bodies would have had to be dif- 
ferent too. The very words " a system of 
nature" indicate that things do not exist 



jo A Plain Argument for God. 

in the world each for itself, but that the 
universe has in it something analogous to 
a human body, in that all its parts have 
relation to all its other parts, and gain 
their significance through their place in 
the system. 

While I reason in this way I must recog- 
nize that my own body is a part of this 
system, and that my own mind is too. If 
another body strikes against my body I 
feel a pain in my mind, and if it had not 
struck against it I would not have felt the 
pain. And when I strike another man's 
body I feel pretty sure that, if he has any 
mind at all, I can cause a pain in that 
mind. Minds and living bodies and other 
bodies all together form one system of 
things, which, taking the word in its 
widest sense, I can call nature. 

Here at once there arises in my mind 
a very natural question. What kind of a 
thing is this one being of which I find 
myself to be a part, and which I know as 
nature ? In one respect I know it is like 



God in Nature. 51 

my own body, in that it is composed of 
parts knit together into a system. But 
is it like my body in another thing, and 
a very important thing, — does this vast 
organism reveal Mind in the same general 
way in which my body reveals mind, and 
other men's bodies reveal mind ? Is a 
Mind revealed by the whole of nature, as 
minds are by some of its parts? And can 
we by interpreting the signs of Mind as 
seen in the whole of nature gain some just 
idea of the attributes of that Mind? The 
problem, you see, is precisely similar to 
the one that meets us every time that we 
see the body of another man. Shall we 
infer mind ? and if so, what kind of a 
mind? So here; shall we infer Mind? 
and if so, what kind of a Mind ? The 
mass of reflective men in all ages are 
impelled to answer : " Yes, the world is 
full of reason, and plan, and marvellous 
adaptation; we may infer Mind, and we 
cannot set limits to its powers." 

Now, to ask a man, who has expressed 



52 A Plain Argument for God. 

this conviction, to show us this Mind, in 
any other way than to point out the marks 
which reveal it, is manifestly just as absurd 
as it would be to ask him to point out the 
mind of another man. He can show you 
the body of the man, and he can show 
you how reasonably the body acts, but 
more than this he cannot do, and more 
than this you cannot expect of him. It 
seems fair to ask you to be as just to the 
great Mind of which we are speaking, as 
you are to other minds, and to content 
yourself with evidence of the same nature. 
The question is simply, whether the sys- 
tem of things as a whole indicates reason, 
or does not. If you decide that it does, 
does this not end the matter? 

But you may object, and rightly, that 
there is still some ambiguity in the phrase 
" to reveal mind," insomuch as the phrase 
is often used in two quite distinct senses. 
Sometimes we say that a watch reveals 
mind, when we do not mean at all that 
the watch has the mind, but that the 



God in Nature. 53 

watchmaker, who made it, has. In one 
sense of the word " reveal," the watch 
reveals mind, and in another sense, the 
watchmaker does. In which of these 
senses does nature reveal mind? as a 
something that leads one to infer mind 
in a something else that has preceded it 
or is connected with it? or as a something 
that reveals mind directly through itself, 
as a man's body reveals his mind ? Let 
us see. 

How do we come to believe that such a 
thing as a watch reveals mind at all ? We 
certainly do not come to the belief by 
observing that the actions of the watch are 
like our own actions, and then inferring 
that they have the same meaning as ex- 
pressions of mind. We reason in this 
way about the watchmaker, but not about 
the watch. About the watch we reason 
as follows : We know by experience that 
our own bodies can act upon other things 
about us, and change their character and 
arrangement. We know, too, that we can 



5/ A Plain Argument for God. 

form a plan in our minds of the way in 
which we would like to arrange the bodies 
around us, and can then, through the 
actions of our bodies, impress upon them 
this plan. When we observe the bodies of 
other men, we see that things acted upon 
by their bodies seem to be arranged ac- 
cording to plan too, or, to speak more 
strictly, seem to be arranged as they are 
arranged after we have acted upon them 
through our bodies and impressed upon 
them the plan in our minds. For instance, 
if I find it inconvenient to shelter myself 
from the rain in a hollow tree, and form an 
idea of some other shelter which would 
be better, and then make a frame of poles 
and cover it with thatch, I know very well 
that the arrangement of the poles and the 
straw is somehow connected with the plan 
in my mind, and realize that if the plan 
had been different the structure would 
have been different. And when I observe 
the body of another man going through 
the motions of building a similar structure, 



God in Nature. 55 

and at last see the completed hut, I can- 
not help seeing that the result is of the 
same sort as what I brought about myself. 
When I realize this, I cannot help thinking 
that the thing indicates a plan in his mind, 
since a similar thing was the expression of 
a plan in mine. I never think of connect- 
ing the plan immediately with the hut, 
but with the man who built it; and when 
I say the hut indicates plan or purpose, 
I mean only that it has marks about it 
which would lead me to suppose, even if 
I should find it now ready made and in a 
desert, that it has had a certain connection 
with a human body, and that that human 
body has had in the mind connected with 
it a plan of the hut. 

So that there is this very important 
difference between the two senses of the 
word in which the watch and the watch- 
maker can be said to " reveal" mind. In 
the case of the man, we can say that mind 
is revealed as directly and immediately as 
it is possible for another mind to be re- 



§6 A Plain Argument for God. 

vealed; and that this revelation does not 
imply any other object existing before the 
man, in -which the mind is revealed, but 
it is revealed here and now in him. In 
the case of the watch, some other object 
is implied, in which the mind is more 
immediately revealed, and to which the 
watch refers us. In every case our ulti- 
mate reference is to the more immediate 
revelation of mind as we find it in the 
man. Objects which reveal mind as the 
watch does, are simply objects which we 
recognize as having a certain connection 
with objects that reveal mind as men do. 
I ask, then, in which of the two senses 
of the word does nature as a whole reveal 
mind ? If it really reveals mind at all it 
must be in one of the two senses, for there 
are only these two. If nature reveals 
mind as a watch does, you must mean by 
this that you are able to go back from 
what you see now to something else that 
reveals mind more immediately and di- 
rectly, just as to explain the watch you go 



God in Nature. 57 

back to the revelation of mind in the 
watchmaker. But have we any reason to 
believe that by going back farther and 
farther we will find mind revealed more 
directly than we do in the world as we see 
it now? Can we expect, passing from 
present nature, which we regard as only 
the watch, the mindless object arranged by 
mind, to come to a something which will 
stand before us as showing mind in this 
higher sense? Surely nature, this great 
complex of which we ourselves are a part, 
is quite as wonderful and as full of reason 
to-day as it has ever been in the past. 
Surely there is no ground to expect that 
by going back we will ever find a time 
when we can say : " Now I have passed 
from the watch to the watchmaker, and 
here I may stop in my search for mind." 
And if the Mind which is revealed in 
nature is as immediately revealed here and 
now as it can be anywhere else or at any 
other time; if, that is, we regard all nature, 
in all times, as revealing Mind in the same 



58 A Plain Argument for God. 

way, and not as referring us back to some- 
thing else, should we not look upon na- 
ture, not as we do upon the watch, but 
rather as we do upon the watchmaker ? as 
we do upon the man standing in front of 
us, and now revealing his present mind 
through words and actions ? Why should 
we look upon the world as an automaton, 
whose connection with mind is not of the 
present but of the past? Is not Reason 
now active about us as well as in us? 
Why banish it from the world in which 
we live? 

Now the name which men have applied 
to the Mind which is revealed in nature, 
and in every part of nature, is God. And 
the view of things which would look upon 
the world as we do upon the watch, refer- 
ring its revelation of mind to the past, as 
I have shown is done by the argument 
which we discussed in the first chapter, is 
simply a view which puts God altogether 
out of the present world, and lets us see in 
the present world only the results of His 



God in Nature. 59 

former activity. But how near would you 
feel to another man if you knew that you 
could never get nearer to him than merely 
to discover indications that at some past 
time he had thought, or felt, or acted ? 
When one reads a book by a man long 
dead it is not the same as when one sees 
before him his friend, and speaks, and is 
answered, knowing that mind reflects mind 
as closely as mind can reflect mind. And 
is it any more satisfactory for the soul that 
cries out for God to be referred to the be- 
ginnings of the world and a First Cause 
of things ? Can he get no nearer to the . 
Divine than that? The arguments for 
God as usually stated do not seem to bring 
him any nearer, but, fortunately for man, 
his inmost convictions are sometimes more 
reasonable and more true than his attempts 
to justify his convictions; and, in spite of 
arguments, the religious mind has always 
felt somehow much nearer to God. Men 
have recognized in the daily experiences 
of their own souls the present goodness 



60 A Plain Argument for God. 

of God. They have seen in the rich 
beauty and admirable arrangement of this 
great world what has made quite credible 
to them the conception of a Mind so em- 
bracing the whole of things as to contain 
in its plan the fall of a sparrow or the 
robing of a flower. If I should ask you 
to abandon the groping for God in the dim 
and distant past, or at least to supplement 
it by looking for God in the present too, 
I should not be asking you to accept a 
new way of finding Him in the world. 
I should only be asking you to make clear 
to yourself the way in which you have 
always found Him there: to realize that 
the lack of clearness and consistency in 
your thought has sometimes led you to be 
much more unjust to the Mind in nature 
than you have been to the little minds in 
nature. That you should reason about 
them in just the same way was well recog- 
nized in the last century by that brilliant 
scholar and charming gentleman Bishop 
Berkeley, whose works deserve more atten- 



God in Nature. 61 

tion than the men of our day allot them. 
I cannot do better than to close this 
chapter with a sentence from his gifted pen 
on our knowledge of God and man : 

" Hence it is plain that we do not see 
a man, — if by man is meant that which 
lives, moves, perceives, and thinks as we 
do, — but only such a certain collection of 
ideas* as directs us to think there is a dis- 
tinct principle of thought and motion, like 
to ourselves, accompanying and represented 
by it. And after the same manner we see 
God; all the difference is that, whereas 
some one finite and narrow assemblage of 
ideas denotes a particular human mind, 
whithersoever we direct our view, we do 
at all* times and in all places perceive mani- 
fest tokens of the Divinity, — everything 
we see, hear, feel, or anywise perceive by 
sense, being a sign or effect of the power 
of God ; as is our perception of those very 
motions which are produced by men." 

* By " ideas" Berkeley here means simply bodily 
qualities. 



CHAPTER IV. 

The Witness of Literature. 

I propose in the present chapter to give 
a few extracts from literature to show that 
the argument for God which I have given, 
and the way of looking at God's relation 
to the world which I have advocated, are 
in no sense new or strange, but on the 
contrary so natural that men have always, 
though sometimes inconsistently and often 
unconsciously, held to them and rested 
upon them. I shall give a very few ex- 
tracts, though I might give very many; 
and I shall take them almost at random, 
for in such a wealth of material it is hard 
to choose. 

The first are from the account given by 
Xenophon of a conversation which Socra- 
tes, the great pagan moralist, held with 
Aristodemus the Little. It would seem 
that this Aristodemus objected to offering 



The Witness of Literature. 6j 

prayers and sacrifices himself, and ridi- 
culed those who did offer them. Socrates 
points out to him at length the evidences 
of intelligence and of benevolent purpose 
to be seen in the structure of man's own 
body, and then the dialogue continues : 

" ' And do you think that you yourself 
have any portion of intelligence ?' ' Ques- 
tion me, at least, and I will answer.' ' And 
can you suppose that nothing intelligent 
exists anywhere else ? When you know 
that you have in your body but a small 
portion of the earth, which is vast, and a 
small portion of the water, which is vast, 
and that your frame is constituted for you 
to receive only a small portion of each of 
other things that are vast, do you think 
that you have seized for yourself, by some 
extraordinary good fortune, intelligence 
alone which exists nowhere else, and that 
this assemblage of vast bodies, countless 
in number, is maintained in order by some- 
thing void of reason ?' ' By Jupiter, I can 
hardly suppose that there is any ruling 



6 /j. A Plain Argument for God. 

intelligence among that assemblage of 
bodies, for I do not see the directors, as 
I see the agent of things which are done 
here.' ' Nor do you see your own soul, 
which is the director of your body ; so 
that, by like reasoning, you may say that 
you yourself do nothing with understand- 
ing, but everything by chance.' " 

;js % * sfc *■ >K ^ 

" ' Consider also, my good youth,' con- 
tinued Socrates, ' that your mind, existing 
within your body, directs your body as it 
pleases ; and it becomes you therefore to 
believe that the intelligence pervading all 
things directs all things as may be agree- 
able to it, and not to think that while your 
eye can extend its sight over many furlongs, 
that of the divinity is unable to see all 
things at once, or that while your mind can 
think of things here or things in Egypt or 
Sicily, the mind of the deity is incapable of 
regarding everything at the same time.' "* 

* I quote from Watson's version. Memorabilia, 
Book I. chap. iv. 



The Witness of Literature. 65 

It is sufficiently evident from this that 
Socrates looked upon the mind in nature 
as revealed after the same manner as the 
mind connected with a human body, — that 
is, he believed it to be revealed as directly 
as one mind can be revealed to another. 
His conception is in perfect harmony with 
the idea of God presented in the preceding 
chapters, and we may see from his life that 
he lived in the realization of an intimate 
relation with the Divine. He was a pagan, 
and seems also to have believed in the 
gods of the popular mythology ; but it 
would appear that this belief was subordi- 
nate to his constant recognition of the all- 
pervading Mind. He certainly believed in 
a present God. 

If we turn from pagan literature to Jew- 
ish, we may almost take that bodily as 
an illustration of the fact that men have 
thought of God as revealed at once in 
nature, as ever present in the world, and 
not to be found merely at the end of an 
indefinite regress into the past. The whole 



66 A Plain Argument for God. 

teaching of the Old Testament is of a God 
in the closest and most intimate relation 
to nature, and whose thought and purpose 
can be read in the order and changes of 
things. The book of the Psalms is full 
of passages which give expression to this 
thought in forms of the highest beauty. 
Can any other view of God be reconciled 
with the spirit of the one hundred and 
fourth psalm ? 

" He appointed the moon for seasons : 
the sun knoweth his going down. 

" Thou makest darkness, and it is night : 
wherein all the beasts of the forest do 
creep forth. 

" The young lions roar after their prey, 
and seek their meat from God. 

" The sun ariseth, they gather themselves 
together, and lay them down in their dens. 

" Man goeth forth unto his work and to 
his labor until the evening. 

" O Lord, how manifold are thy works ! 
in wisdom hast thou made them all : the 
earth is full of thy riches. 



The Witness of Literature. 6j 

" So is this great and wide sea, wherein 
are things creeping innumerable, both 
small and great beasts. 

" There go the ships : there is that le- 
viathan, whom thou hast made to play 
therein. 

" These wait all upon thee ; that thou 
mayest give them their meat in due season. 

" That thou givest them they gather : 
thou openest thine hand, they are rilled 
with good. 

" Thou hidest thy face, they are troub- 
led : thou takest away their breath, they 
die, and return to their dust. 

" Thou sendest forth thy spirit, they are 
created : and thou renewest the face of the 
earth. 

"The glory of the Lord shall endure 
forever: the Lord shall rejoice in his 
works. 

" He looketh on the earth, and it trem- 
bleth : he toucheth the hills, and they 
smoke. 

" I will sing unto the Lord as long as I 



68 A Plain Argument for God. 

live : I will sing praise to my God while I 
have my being. 

" My meditation of him shall be sweet : 
I will be glad in the Lord." 

And would the trust and confidence of 
the twenty-third psalm seem natural in one 
who did not feel God very near to him ? 
In the Hebrew scriptures, surely this view 
of God as now seen through nature is to 
be found. 

And what shall we say to the teachings 
of the New Testament from beginning to 
end ? What can be plainer than this : 

" And why take ye thought for rai- 
ment? Consider the lilies of the field, 
how they grow ; they toil not, neither do 
they spin : 

" And yet I say unto you, That even 
Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed 
like one of these. 

"Wherefore, if God so clothe the grass 
of the field, which to-day is, and to-morrow 
is cast into the oven, shall he not much 
more clothe you, O ye of little faith ? 



The Witness of Literature. 69 

" Therefore take no thought, saying, 
What shall we eat? or, What shall we 
drink? or, Wherewithal shall we be 
clothed ? 

" (For after all these things do the Gen- 
tiles seek :) for your heavenly Father 
knoweth that ye have need of all these 
things." 

This certainly does not read as if our 
evidence for God directed us always to 
the past, and away from the world that is. 
Nor is St. Paul at the Areopagus less clear 
in his teaching: 

" God that made the world and all 
things therein, seeing that he is Lord of 
heaven and earth, dwelleth not in temples 
made with hands ; 

" Neither is worshipped with men's 
hands, as though he needed anything, see- 
ing he giveth to all life, and breath, and 
all things; 

"And hath made of one blood all na- 
tions of men for to dwell on all the face 
of the earth, and hath determined the 



jo A Plain Argument for God. 

times before appointed, and the bounds of 
their habitation; 

" That they should seek the Lord, if 
haply they might feel after him, and find 
him, though he be not far from every one 
of us : 

" For in him we live, and move, and 
have our being; as certain also of your 
own poets have said, For we are also his 
offspring." 

One cannot feel that he lives, and moves, 
and has his being in that which he can 
only reach by going back to the creation 
of the world. The words denote the most 
intimate relation between man's life and 
God. 

The devotional literature of the Chris- 
tian church is pervaded with the same 
spirit. This is well shown in the collects 
in the Book of Common Prayer : 

" O God, whose never-failing providence 
ordereth all things both in heaven and 
earth ; We humbly beseech thee, to put 
away from us all hurtful things, and to 



The Witness of Literature. ji 

give us those things which are profitable 
for us ; through Jesus Christ our Lord." 

" O Lord, we beseech thee, let thy con- 
tinual pity cleanse and defend thy Church ; 
and, because it cannot continue in safety 
without thy succor, preserve it evermore 
by thy help and goodness ; through Jesus 
Christ our Lord." 

It is but natural to find the language of 
worship expressing such a view of God, 
for, as I have said before, religion, in any 
true sense of the word, would hardly seem 
possible to one who believed in a God in 
no close relation to him and to the world. 
The religious mind tends to regard nature 
as did George Herbert: 

" O sacred Providence, who from end to end 
Strongly and sweetly movest ! shall I write, 
And not of Thee, through whom my fingers bend 
To hold my quill? Shall they not do Thee right?" 

Here nature is not separated from God as 
a thing at a distance. God is found in and 
through nature, giving nature meaning 



J 2 A Plain Argument for God. 

and worth. It was thus that Coleridge 
saw God in the world : 

"Thou first and chief, sole Sovereign of the Vale, 
O struggling with the darkness all the night, 
And visited all night by troops of stars, 
Or when they climb the sky or when they sink; 
Companion of the Morning-star at dawn, 
Thyself earth's rosy star, and of the dawn 
Co-herald : wake, O wake, and utter praise ! 
Who sank thy sunless pillars deep in earth? 
Who fill'd thy countenance with rosy light? 
Who made thee parent of perpetual streams? 

" And you, ye five wild torrents fiercely glad ! 
Who called you forth from night and utter death ? 
From dark and icy caverns called you forth, 
Down those precipitous, black, jagged rocks, 
Forever shattered, and the same forever? 
Who gave you your invulnerable life, 
Your strength, your speed, your fury, and your joy, 
Unceasing thunder, and eternal foam? 
And who commanded (and the silence came), 
Here let the billows stiffen and have rest? 

" Ye Ice-falls ! ye that from the mountain's brow 
Adown enormous ravines slope amain, — 
Torrents, methinks, that heard a mighty Voice, 
And stopped at once amid their maddest plunge ! 



The Witness of Literature. 73 

Motionless torrents! Silent cataracts! 
Who made you glorious as the Gates of Heaven, 
Beneath the keen full moon? Who bade the sun 
Clothe you with rainbows ? Who, with living 

flowers 
Of loveliest blue, spread garlands at your feet? — 
God ! let the torrents, like a shout of nations, 
Answer ! and let the ice-plains echo, God ! 
God ! sing, ye meadow-streams, with gladsome voice, 
Ye pine groves, with your soft and soul-like sounds. 
And they too have a voice, yon piles of snow, 
And in their perilous fall shall thunder, God! 

" Ye living flowers that skirt the eternal frost ! 
Ye wild goats sporting round the eagle's nest! 
Ye eagles, playmates of the mountain-storm ! 
Ye lightnings, the dread arrows of the clouds! 
Ye signs and wonders of the element ! 
Utter forth God, and fill the hills with praise !" 

This is the view of nature held by the 
religious mind, as I have said, in all ages. 
It might be illustrated by countless cita- 
tions, but I will give no more. Those who 
have held it have not always clearly com- 
prehended its significance, nor have they 
seen that their formal reasonings were not 



j/f. A Plain Argument for God, 

always in sympathy with it. Nevertheless 
they held it, and lived by it, and gained 
great comfort from it, as do multitudes to- 
day, who according to their formal argu- 
ments have no right to such comfort at 
all. It is one thing to have a belief, and 
another to be able to put it into a formula 
or reason about it. 



CHAPTER V. 

Theism or Pantheism. 

Although the religious literature of the 
past and the present seems to testify to the 
fact, that the way of finding God in the 
world which I have presented is natural to 
men, yet it is quite possible that when 
you think about it you are at first repelled 
by it. " You wish me to look upon the 
world," you say, " as revealing God, as a 
man's body reveals his mind. Is not this 
a strange conception, — the world the body 
of God ? Has God a body? Is the world, 
then, God ?" I will answer this by making 
clear what this view of God really implies, 
and what it does not. 

And first I must distinguish between 
Theism and what is known as Pantheism. 
When I explained the difference between 
Theism and Deism, I said that theism be- 
lieves in a God revealed in nature as not 



j6 A Plain Argument for God. 

merely Creator, but as Preserver and Gov- 
ernor of things. I did not in any sense 
call nature God, but spoke of God as re- 
vealed in nature. I afterwards explained 
at some length the way in which He is 
revealed in nature, and showed that when 
we say we find Him there, we mean we 
find Him as we find another man's mind, 
through the indications in his body. This 
is theism. 

The word pantheism is used very 
vaguely and loosely, but when it has any 
distinctive meaning at all, it means simply 
the belief that nature is God. A consist- 
ent pantheist is a man who holds, not that 
one is to find God as a something distinct 
from nature and seen through nature, but 
that one is to look upon nature itself as 
God. Evidently, such a man cannot think 
that God is inferred from the whole of 
things as his neighbor's mind is inferred 
from the actions of his body. Evidently, 
the whole argument which has to do with 
the search for minds, and the application 



Theism or Pantlieism. jj 

of this reasoning to the search for God is 
quite useless to the pantheist. He can see 
a good deal of the world directly. If this 
is God, then he can see God at once, and 
needs no process of inference. But it fol- 
lows that God is not, then, a mind or any- 
thing like a mind, beyond his own and 
revealed to it as minds are revealed. One 
does not thus see other minds. More 
than this : the emotions of love and ven- 
eration, which naturally arise when one 
mind feels itself in relation to another, 
have no logical place in the mind of the pan- 
theist. What one loves is a person, and if 
one calls up in himself this emotion in the 
presence of what he does not recognize as 
anything like a person, in the plain com- 
mon sense of that word, then he must 
have deceived himself into having the 
emotion through some unwarranted asso- 
ciation of ideas with the words which he 
is using, or through some want of clear- 
ness in his thought. The very use of 
the word God is likely to call up religious 



y8 A Plain Argument for God, 

emotion, from the rich associations of the 
word, and from what it naturally suggests 
to the man who pronounces it. If the 
pantheist keeps calling the world God, he 
may educate himself into a very high 
respect for the world, but after all it is 
only the world, and the name does not 
add anything to it. It does not imply the 
discovery that the word God in its natu- 
ral and common sense may properly be 
applied to it. Some so-called pantheists 
have, to be sure, been very religious men, 
but they seem to have had a capacity, like 
the four Jews under Nebuchadnezzar, of 
thriving on very little. In so far as they 
have really been pantheists, and not merely 
somewhat inconsistent theists, they have 
had no right to be religious at all in the 
ordinary sense of the term. And in so far 
as their thinking has given them a right to 
what we call religion, it has been simply 
some form of theism. 

Lord Tennyson's little poem on " The 
Higher Pantheism" presents a self-con- 



Theism or Pantheism. 79 

tradictory title; for where this way of 
thinking is really pantheism it is not 
"higher," and where it is "higher" it is 
not pantheism. It is the theistic element 
in it which appeals to religious emotion. 

" The sun, the moon, the stars, the seas, the hills and 
the plains,— 
Are not these, O Soul, the Vision of Him who reigns ? 

" Is not the Vision He ? Tho' He be not that which 
He seems ? 
Dreams are true while they last, and do we not live 
in dreams?" 

********* 
" Speak to Him, thou, for He hears, and Spirit with 
Spirit can meet, — 
Closer is He than breathing, and nearer than hands 
and feet." 

The pantheist, if he is to be consistent, 
and if he is to differ at all from the theist, 
must repudiate this last couplet altogether, 
or use the words in new and vague senses. 
If God is simply the world and nothing 
more, He cannot hear any more than a 



80 A Plain Argument for God. 

dead body, nor can Spirit meet with Spirit 
in any sense at all. What we are to speak 
to in such a case is simply 

" The sun, the moon, the stars, the seas, the hills and 
the plains," 

and speaking becomes no longer desirable 
or significant. Nor can we be much stirred 
by reflection upon " the Vision of Him 
who reigns" if we keep in mind that this 
is simply saying over again what has been 
said in the line just quoted, and adds 
nothing at all to the thought. We are 
tricked out of the emotion which properly 
hovers around capital letters, and forget 
for the moment that there is no such thing 
as " reigning" after this fashion. 

From all this it is evident that the view 
of God- which I have presented as reason- 
able cannot in any proper sense of that 
term be called pantheism. It is all the 
difference between soul and no soul in the 
system of things. This view does not say 
that God is nature, but that God is seen 



Theism or Pantheism. 81 

through nature in just the way that any 
mind is revealed to any other mind. It 
insists that one should use common jus- 
tice in arguing about God, and ask oneself 
at each step in the argument whether one 
would argue in the same way about one's 
fellow-man. The man who holds this 
view distinguishes, between the body of 
his friend and the mind of his friend, and 
realizes, that if he could be quite sure that 
a mind had ceased to be connected with 
that body, his attitude towards it would be 
very different from what it is now. In like 
manner, when he looks upon the world, he 
believes that he finds revealed in it some- 
thing analogous to the mind that is re- 
vealed in his friend. He does not con- 
found this with the world itself any more 
than he confounds his friend's mind with 
his body. It is this something which he 
has inferred that he calls God, and it is 
this that is the object of his religious emo- 
tion. Should he come to believe that 
there are not in the world marks of mind 



82 A Plain Argument for God. 

analogous to the marks of mind discovered 
in a human body, he would have to con- 
fess that he has no longer a God in the 
sense in which he has all along used the 
word. He does not in the least believe, 
taking those words in their usual meaning, 
that nature is God. I think I have made 
sufficiently plain my answer to the ques- 
tion whether this view does not make 
nature God. 

And now for the question, whether it 
does not make the world as it were the 
body of God, and whether this is not a 
startling idea? It must be at once ad- 
mitted that we are not accustomed to 
talking in this way. We may go farther 
and say that it is undesirable to talk in 
this way. One may hold that the relation 
of God to the world has in it something 
analogous to the relation of man's mind to 
his body, and yet one may hold at the 
same time that the similarity is not so 
close that it justifies one in applying to the 
world this term. The word body has all 



Theism or Pantheism. " 83 

sorts of associations in our minds which 
make us hesitate, very properly, to apply 
it in this case. We think, when we use 
the word, of a certain shape and structure, 
and of certain functions, which belong to 
our bodies as animal bodies, but which are 
not found in the system of things taken 
as a whole, and should not be associated 
with that whole. The trouble here is in 
the word and its associations. If we lay 
the word aside, and keep in mind the 
thought, that what is meant is simply that 
God is revealed by the world as a whole 
in a manner analogous to that in which 
a man's mind is revealed by the little 
mass of matter that we call his body, 
there is nothing in the thought that is 
startling or even new. The thought has 
been realized dimly by many, and with 
some clearness by a few. It is simply 
the belief in a present God, and nothing 
more. 

Of course this should be expressed so 
as to avoid misunderstanding. A rose by 



84. A Plain Argument for God. 

any other name will quite possibly not 
smell as sweet. The names given to 
things affect very much our opinions of 
the things. It is quite possible to arouse 
in a mind opposition to views in them- 
selves not at all calculated to arouse op- 
position, by giving those views an unjust 
or misleading name. The unthinking are 
very apt to rest in the name, and not to go 
on to a careful consideration of the thought 
itself; and even the thinking man, who is 
concerned chiefly with thoughts and not 
words, may find it difficult to shake off the 
associations which an unfortunate name 
will call up. So avoid expressing this 
view of God, and of His presence in the 
world, in a way which will mislead your- 
self and others. Avoid using words which 
seem strange and unaccustomed. Of one 
thing you may be quite sure, and that is, 
that when this view is expressed in such a 
way as to be really understood, it will 
meet with no opposition from men of a 
religious mind, who have always believed 



Tlieism or Pantheism. 85 

just this, and have found God about them 
in the world of to-day. If clearly appre- 
hended, this view will be welcomed as 
marking out theism from deism on the one 
hand and pantheism on the other. 



CHAPTER VI. 

The Reign of Law in Nature. 

It remains to consider in this and the 
following chapter two or three objections 
which it is supposed can be justly urged 
from the point of view of modern science 
against the argument for God. The first 
is from the reign of natural law. 

I have some distance back called atten- 
tion to the fact that the marvels of the 
" Arabian Nights," which seem so natural 
and so absorbing to the mind of the child, 
fail to interest the grown man, because 
they seem unreal and unreasonable. He 
regards them as unnatural and in their 
nature incredible, and the flights of the un- 
disciplined imagination no longer please. 
The view of nature as arbitrary and always 
surprising, which is natural to a child with- 
out much experience of nature, has given 
place in the mind of an intelligent man to 



The Reign of Law in Nature. 8y 

a view of nature as a system of things 
having a certain fixed order and obeying 
certain laws. Gradually there has emerged 
from the chaos of his first unconnected ex- 
periences a consciousness of regularity and 
causal connection. He no longer looks 
upon anything and everything as possible, 
but he looks for what he has come to re- 
gard as natural, and he looks for it 
because he believes there are in nature 
causes which would regularly produce it. 
Where there are such causes he usually 
believes the effect will follow without fail, 
and where there are not such causes he 
believes that it will not happen. The de- 
scription of the way in which causes in 
nature produce their effects he calls natu- 
ral law, and he does not often expect any 
natural law to have exceptions which may 
not be explained through the action of 
some other natural law. In other words, 
he has grown to have a tendency to regard 
the order of nature as fixed and invariable. 
The childhood of the race resembles 



88 A Plain Argument for God. 

that of the individual in its way of look- 
ing at nature. It is only little by little 
that the view taken by science has come 
to be accepted at all. Nature is so com- 
plex and her forces so variously combined 
that it is by no means easy to see that the 
same causes always produce the same ef- 
fects, and that the order of things is 
throughout invariable. That there is an 
order we can see easily enough, and that 
in general causes and effects follow each 
other according to rule, but it must be 
confessed that we have not yet so meas- 
ured and weighed and compared all things 
as to be able to say, except by way of a 
guess, that there are no exceptions to these 
rules, but that all that happens happens 
according to natural law and as a neces- 
sary result of what has preceded it. Per- 
haps the majority of men still hold that 
the reign of law is not strictly universal, 
and that a complete knowledge would re- 
veal in nature what cannot be made to fall 
under the dominion of law; but, on the 



The Reign of Law in Nature. 8p 

other hand, many minds have been so im- 
pressed with what has been thus far gained 
in the way of exact knowledge of causes 
and effects, as to look forward with con- 
fidence to a time when the increase of 
knowledge will show that all things with- 
out exception are bound by what has been 
called natural necessity, and come and go 
only according to the fixed methods known 
as natural laws. Of course science, of 
whose very essence it is to detect uniform- 
ities and rules in nature, must assume, if 
only as a working theory, that all things 
come under law; but whether this view 
taken by science is right or not is a ques- 
tion which science cannot settle until 
human knowledge is complete. 

While men have been reducing the oc- 
currences of nature as a whole to system 
and discovering law, they have been dis- 
covering that that little fragment of nature 
which we call a man is not a merely arbi- 
trary and lawless thing, but that he seems 
at least to some degree to fall under the 



oo A Plain Argument for God. 

dominion of law like other things. His 
body certainly acts and reacts like other 
animal bodies, and the science of medicine 
is based on the assumption that its ways 
of acting will be regular and constant. If 
there were not a certain sequence and plan 
in the unfolding of his mind, no mental 
science would be possible. And when we 
consider that much discussed and quar- 
relled over faculty, the human will, we 
must all admit that we do not act towards 
men as though we regarded this element 
in them as purely arbitrary and subject to 
no law at all. We use persuasion in hopes 
of moving the will, and we threaten pun- 
ishment in hopes of frightening it into 
submission. We recognize certain mo- 
tives as naturally inducing to certain ac- 
tions ; and we often regard actions, at first 
glance apparently inexplicable, as suffi- 
ciently explained when we discover the 
motives which must have influenced the 
doer. When we say that it is natural that 
a man should act in this way or that or 



The Reign of Law in Nature. pi 

choose this or that, we indicate by the 
very use of the word "natural" that hu- 
man actions are in some way to be ac- 
counted for, and are to be looked upon 
as at least in part natural results of what 
has preceded. 

There are some who believe that the 
subjection of man's will to natural law is 
only partial, and that the previous state of 
his mind and the motives brought to bear 
on it will not completely account for all 
he chooses and does; on the other hand, 
there are those who believe that what 
seems inexplicable in men's actions is not 
at all to be referred to a will free in such 
a sense as to break the uniformities of 
nature, but to be referred to our ignorance 
of the forces which are actually working 
within and around men. If we knew all, 
they say, we could see that man's actions 
are fixed and subject to law. Evidently 
this dispute cannot be settled in the 
present stage of our knowledge by an ap- 
peal to observation, for man is so compli- 



92 A Plain Argument for God. 

cated and intricate a being, that no one 
yet knows with sufficient exactitude the 
forces which are bound up in him to state 
with any certainty whether their regular 
action will account for all he does or not. 
It will probably be long before the dispute 
will he settled by an appeal to experience. 
Now, I am not at all concerned just 
here with the question whether they are 
right who believe that the reign of natural 
law in external nature and in man is uni- 
versal and without exceptions, or they who 
believe that the order of nature is not so 
fixed that it cannot be and is not set aside 
by something which does not fall into the 
chain of causes and effects. This ques- 
tion is a very interesting one in itself; but 
I am now discussing the argument for 
God, and what interests me here is the 
question : How would it affect the argu- 
ment for God, or would it affect it at all, 
if nature, including man, were found to 
be subject to fixed and unvarying law? 
Would it do away with God ? or necessa- 



The Reign of Law in Nature. pj 

rily change our view of Him as in close 
personal relations with us ? The question 
is a living one, for there are many persons 
who think that God is revealed as breaking 
in upon the order of nature rather than as 
acting in and through that natural order, 
and who are inclined to believe that a view 
which sees in all nature an unbroken reg- 
ularity does away with God altogether. 

In answering this question I will ask 
you to keep clearly in mind the argument 
for God as it has been presented. You 
remember that it was said that we pass 
from all nature to God very much as we 
pass by inference from man's body and its 
actions to man's mind. It was insisted 
that the search for minds always takes 
place in the same general way, whether 
the mind sought be a small one or a very 
great one. But if the reasoning which 
leads us to infer man's mind and that 
which leads us to infer God are in their 
nature similar, any view of things which 
applies equally to man's body and to the 



94. A Plain Argument for God. 

whole of nature must affect the two argu- 
ments in the same way. If such a view 
makes it impossible to infer a God, it must 
make it impossible to infer another man's 
mind ; and if it does not destroy the ar- 
gument for human minds it should not 
destroy the argument for God. 

Now, if we have reason to think that the 
laws of nature are uniform and invariable, 
and everything happens according to natu- 
ral necessity, then of course we have 
reason to think that man is subject to 
this natural necessity too. We must look 
upon every word we hear him utter and 
every motion we see him make as a neces- 
sary result of what has preceded, and in 
no sense arbitrary or spontaneous. If we 
knew all the natural forces at work in him 
and arounyd him, and had some skill in 
computation, we could predict his words 
and acts as we can predict that an egg will 
be broken before we have seen it touch the 
ground. Suppose all this to be so. Would 
we think that this human body in front of 



The Reign of Law in Nature. g$ 

us, now speaking wisely and acting reason- 
ably, does not reveal mind, merely because 
there is nothing irregular and lawless in 
these words and actions ? Would we 
doubt that a long series of benevolent acts 
indicated a kindly spirit, even if these acts 
were persisted in with the greatest regu- 
larity ? Does it follow, because the bodily 
signs of a man's thought occur in an 
orderly manner to be explained by refer- 
ence to the general laws of the world, that 
they are no longer signs of his thought ? 
The argument which proved them to be 
such is not at all affected by their being 
constant and regular. 

If we refer to our experience of men, 
we do not find that that increasing knowl- 
edge of human nature which leads us to 
look upon the unknown element in men 
as a diminishing quantity, and to have a 
growing expectation that such and such 
human actions will in general follow as a 
consequence of such and such motives, — 
we do not find that this increasing knowl- 



p6 A Plain Argument for God. 

edge of human nature as a thing at least 
to some degree subject to uniform laws has 
had any tendency to make us believe that 
men's bodies do not reveal their minds. 
Nor do we any the less believe those 
minds to be revealed as wise or unwise, 
good or bad. 

And when we observe those who have 
gone over to the extreme view that every- 
thing in man, without exception, is subject 
to natural necessity, we find that even they 
are not in the least inclined to give up a 
belief in other men's minds as revealed 
through their bodies. Such people marry 
and are given in marriage like any one else. 
They love their children, and believe that 
they are loved by them in return. They 
have their friendships and their intimacies 
and their enmities like other people. They 
do not hesitate to use persuasion with 
their fellows, and when they prefer a re- 
quest, they look for it to be granted. In 
all this they do not see any infringement 
of natural law, and they would maintain 



The Reign of Law in Nature. gj 

that if it is found that one mind can be 
revealed to another mind and in any way 
influence its action, the description of the 
way in which minds thus interact may 
properly be called a natural law, and ac- 
cepted as an undoubted truth. Their be- 
lief seems in no way to change their 
practical attitude towards those about 
them, or to make their social relations 
less close and intimate. 

I ask then, why, if the doctrine of the 
uniformity of nature's methods does not 
affect one's belief in the mind which is 
revealed by that small part of nature 
called a human body, it should affect one's 
belief in the one great Mind revealed in 
every part of nature ? Surely there is no 
reason for this unjust discrimination in t 
favor of man. 

Should it be said that this view would 
at least destroy all belief in the efficacy of 
prayer as influencing the order of events ; 
I answer, not at all, unless it would also 
destroy the possibility of believing that 

9 



p8 A Plain Argument for God. 

one may ask a man a favor and have him 
grant it because asked. If the latter can 
be looked upon as natural, so can the 
former. And in just the same sense. In 
both cases it is simply a question of fact. 
Are favors granted and prayers answered, 
or are they not ? What has the uni- 
formity of nature to do with the ques- 
tion? 



CHAPTER VII. 

The Eternity of Matter and the Doctrine 
of Evolution. 

Just as in the last chapter it did not fall 
within my purpose to decide whether the 
reign of law is universal or subject to ex- 
ceptions, so in the present chapter it does 
not concern me to decide whether matter 
and force are eternal or not, or whether 
the doctrine of evolution is to be accepted 
or not. I merely propose to consider 
briefly how it would affect our argument 
for God if these questions were to be de- 
cided in the affirmative. This, I should 
think, ought to be of interest even for 
those who have little fear that the final 
answers to the questions will be in the 
affirmative. The White Knight had a 
mouse-trap fastened to his saddle, as he 
believed it would be very disagreeable to 
have mice running about on the back of 



ioo A Plain Argument for God. 

his horse, and yet he freely admitted that 
it was highly improbable that mice should 
be found in that peculiar situation. It was 
well, he thought, to be quite secure. And 
since the beliefs that matter and force are 
eternal and indestructible, and that the 
doctrine of evolution is to be accepted as 
true, are sufficiently common beliefs in 
our day, and many men believe that they 
are gradually collecting evidence which 
will prove these beliefs well grounded, it 
would certainly be more agreeable for the 
man who is watching the efforts to collect 
such evidence to feel sure that, whatever 
the event, it will not rob him of God, than 
to fear that his belief can stand only in 
case these investigators fail to establish 
theirs. If he sees that the argument for 
God remains whether these questions are 
answered in the one way or the other, or 
remain unanswered, he is not tempted to 
look with sourness on sincere efforts to 
increase human knowledge, and he can 
await with patience and an open mind the 



The Eternity of Matter. 101 

results of an honest inquiry. I shall try 
in a very few words to show that the solu- 
tion of these problems, most interesting in 
themselves, is in no way of vital impor- 
tance to the argument for God. 

Stated plainly, the doctrine of the eter- 
nity of matter and force means simply that 
the system of things of which we are a 
part has not had a beginning in time, but 
has always existed, and passed through 
its series of changes according to certain 
uniform methods. The whole amount of 
matter and force in the world is neither 
increased nor diminished, but only under- 
goes certain changes in form. As I have 
already discussed the question whether 
the uniformity and regularity of nature's 
methods can affect the argument for God, 
it remains only to inquire whether that 
argument can be affected by the denial of a 
beginning to this series of natural changes. 

Now, it is evident that if a man's argu- 
ment for God can find Him only as a re- 
sult of a regress from effect to cause, and 



102 A Plain Argument for God. 

from that to its cause, and so on up to the 

cause which limits the whole series, — that 

is, only by going back to the creation of 

things, — it is evident that, if this is his 

only way of arriving at God, in the denial 

w^ of a beginning of things he loses his God. 

And since the deist, as I have shown, tries 

to find God in just this way, he cannot 

hold to the eternity of the world and go 

on believing in God too. 

But if, on the other hand, one finds God 

in the world here and now, as does the 

theist, and does not think it necessary to 

go back to the past for evidence of his 
is 

existence, it is not easy to see how the 
doctrine of the eternity of the world can 
affect his belief. If the system of things 
reveals God now and always, the answer 
to the question how long the world has 
existed will also be the answer to the 
question how long God has been revealed 
in the world, but it will have nothing to 
do with the question whether He is re- 
vealed there or not. I ask you again to 



The Eternity of Matter. ioj 

reason about this great Mind with the 
common sense and common justice that 
you use in reasoning about men's minds. 
Suppose we find in a man's walk and 
conversation evidences of thought and in- 
telligence. Would our discovery of the 
fact that there had been indications of 
thought in him for a long time in the 
past make him seem less rational to us in 
the present ? We can conceive, though of 
course we cannot believe, that he did not 
begin to reveal mind at a certain definite 
time, but always existed much as he does 
now. Would that at all affect the question 
whether his mind is revealed ? Would 
we not, if we came to such a belief con- 
cerning him, simply add to our present 
opinion that his mind is revealed, the 
opinion that it always has been revealed? 
And if the world has always existed, and 
has always been full of evidences of reason, 
does this not simply mean that there has 
always been a revelation of God, and that 
it has not merely dated from a certain 



104. A Plain Argument for God. 

time in the past? If I insist that a mind 
exists, and point in proof to plain indica- 
tions of it, it can hardly be regarded as 
a refutation of my position to maintain 
that the series of indications is a much 
longer one than I had supposed. We 
have in our books on Logic a pet name 
for refutations of this blundering nature. 
And now to turn to the doctrine of 
evolution and its significance for theism. 
It is well to remember that evolution 
means simply an unfolding. It is the 
doctrine that what is has succeeded what 
was according to certain uniform methods. 
It does not imply that the later and higher 
has been in the earlier and lower in any 
strict sense of the word in ; nor does it 
imply that the high is not high, because 
it has been preceded by the lower. We 
all accept the fact that Sir Isaac Newton 
began life as an almost bodiless, and 
certainly almost mindless, human infant. 
Our knowledge of what he was once 
does not diminish our respect for what 



The Eternity of Matter. 105 

he became later. And the theory that 
the present condition of things has suc- 
ceeded the past according to uniform law 
should not in itself lessen our apprecia- 
tion of what the world is now or of what 
it has been. The world is what it is, 
and the evolution question is but one of 
method : How did the world get to be 
what it is ? 

But whether there has been a gradual 
unfolding of the system of nature accord- 
ing to uniform methods, or whether. there 
have been breaks in its history, does not 
the argument for God stand just the 
same? If the evolutionist shows that 
things are brought about with regularity 
and by means nicely adjusted to attain 
their ends, does this prove that nature no 
longer reveals a mind ? does it make things 
look irrational ? The question, you see, 
is after all one that has been answered 
already in the decision that constancy and 
uniformity in actions do not prevent their 
being a revelation of mind. If the world 



106 A Plain Argument for God. 

reveals reason and the unfolding of nature 
seems according to plan, then the fact that 
we can observe uniformities and discover 
laws proves only that God is not revealed 
as arbitrary. It cannot prove that He is 
not revealed at all. 

There is, so far as I can see, only one 
way in which the student of natural sci- 
ence may refute our argument for God. 
If he ever succeeds in proving that nature 
is irrational, and that things do not reveal 
mind, he will have answered the argument. 
Whatever else he may succeed in proving, 
unless he establish this, he leaves the argu- 
ment untouched. 



CHAPTER VIII. 
Conclusion. 

In the foregoing pages I have tried to 
make clear that the argument for God is 
simply the natural argument for a mind 
revealed in the system of things, and I 
have dwelt upon the fact that this argu- 
ment is not to be regarded as subject to 
objections which may not be urged with 
equal force against the arguments for other 
minds. Throughout I have insisted upon 
the necessity of keeping in mind the anal- 
ogy between the argument for God and 
the reasoning which convinces us of the 
existence of minds in other men. In the 
light of this analogy, objections to the 
argument from the reign of natural law, 
from the eternity of the world, and from 
the doctrine of evolution have been seen 
to be quite aside from the point at issue. 

And it will be well to remember that we 



108 A Plain Argument for God. 

may very possibly get help in any new 
difficulties which may meet us in reflecting 
upon the idea of God, if we will adhere 
closely to this thought. If, for example, 
we come upon some new problem which 
we cannot solve, and which throws us into 
confusion, it will be well to ask ourselves 
whether a similar difficulty does not meet 
us when we think about the revelation of 
any mind to any other. If it does, and if, 
nevertheless, we feel justified in going on 
believing in other men's minds, we should 
go on believing in God. This looking for 
the difficulty in the case of human minds 
may not solve the problem, but it will at 
least show us that it is a much broader one 
than we had thought, and it may strongly 
incline us not to believe it incapable of 
solution. 

I will show what I mean by taking an 
instance. You ask me : Where is this 
God of whom we have been talking all 
along? I answer: I will try to tell you, 
just as soon as you have told me where I 



Conclusion. lop 

will find the mind — not the body, but the 
mind — of another man. Difficulties which 
apply equally to every case in which one 
mind is revealed to another cannot be 
regarded as peculiarly objections to the 
argument for God. 

Now that my argument is finished, I 
would say that all through this little book 
I have used words in their usual senses, 
and have remained upon what has been 
called the ground of the common un- 
derstanding. I have made use of such 
phrases as " the world without us," " cause 
and effect," " revealed in nature," " other 
minds," and many more, without discuss- 
ing them more than was necessary to 
bring you to see the force of my argu- 
ment. But the philosopher delights in a 
microscopic analysis of just such phrases. 
He would by no means think his task 
finished if he should read what I have 
written, and having gotten to the end, 
should find that he agreed with its con- 
clusions. He would in all probability set 



no A Plain Argument for God. 

to work to write a much larger book than 
mine, full of hair-splitting distinctions on 
the subject of " self" and " not-self," and 
queries as to how one mind can be con- 
scious of another, or whether spirits can 
be said to be anywhere at all. He would 
certainly find many questions to ask, and 
he would probably have to leave some of 
them unanswered. 

Into this debatable land it has been no 
part of my purpose to penetrate. If the 
reasoning of the previous chapters is good, 
a further analysis may serve to make what 
is dim and vague in it clear and exact, but 
it cannot do away with any part of it. In 
this reflection those who are not philoso- 
phers may rest content. The interest of 
most men in the argument for God is a 
practical one and concerns common life. 
For common life, the ground of the com- 
mon understanding, if it is solid ground, 
is good enough. 



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